Near miss

Burns, sure. Frequent caloric overload, maybe. But you don’t think of working in a bakery as especially risky.

Two weeks ago though, while taking cookies out of the oven to display in the cases next to the ginger scones and chocolate bobka, Sharon Sutter felt a fearsome shudder and heard death whistle past her head.

She hasn’t fully recovered since.

Her descriptively named A-Frame Bakery sits on Cold Spring Road in Williamstown, MA, directly across from the spot where Route 2 from Albany ends in a steep decline. From the front window, the only place you can look out of a building that is otherwise all roof, you can see the highway terminate. On June 29, a 65-foot tractor-trailer filled with 22 tons of stearic acid and two men came barreling off the highway at what had to be 80 miles an hour or more.

It sailed past the runaway truck ramp next to the road, flew past the stop sign and pile-drived into the giant purple blocks of poured cement that ring the bakery. As if all these devices to prevent exactly what happened never existed, the truck-turned-missile aimed at the bakery.

At her warm oven, Sutter felt glass rattle and the building shake. She heard a wind and then what she remembers as all kinds of noises that were not right and nothing good.

She ran out the front door and could see and smell smoke, but was she couldn’t tell what had happened.

Not until she went around the building, saw the deep tire tracks cut into the dirt, the crushed trees, the chipped cement blocks – and the broken truck tilted down into Hemlock Brook. Inside the sunken cab, the driver was dead and his passenger badly hurt.

The tracks clearly showed that the hurtling truck had passed no more than 20 feet from the building.

Sutter called 911 but others – probably workers fixing Route 2 just uphill from the bakery – had called already and before she knew it her parking lot and the street out front were swarming with rescuers, fire engines and ambulances, a hazmat team. She called her husband Richard who came right away too.

And good thing, because Sutter admits she wasn’t exactly thinking clearly then and still isn’t, though she can talk about it some now, only crying a little.

Her sense of time was rattled, What must have been only a few minutes — in her mind — stretches on and on and is all spread out.

She can’t help thinking about what happened when the clock in her brain stopped ticking. A man died, she came close. Her business could have been wiped out. All disturbing, but it’s the “What-ifs” that really make her crazy.

The accident happened just after 8 on a Wednesday morning. A-Frame does a good breakfast trade what with her muffins, bread and those scones. What if someone had been in the parking lot when the truck flew through?

The Sutters’ six children range in age from 17 to 5 and are usually all over the shop, the older ones filling in behind the counter helping with customers, the younger ones playing in the woods by the brook or in the parking lot near the purple blocks. What if they had been out playing that morning or had been waiting for a school bus on Cold Spring Road?

The road construction has shrunk Route 2 to just one lane which usually, but not at the moment on June 29 when this happened, means cars lined up waiting to get through. What if the truck had barreled through them?

What if the doomed driver, apparently without his brakes and unable to turn into the runaway ramp that would have stopped him, had not steered away from the building? Or away from the propane gas tank? She is grateful to a man she didn’t know who lost his life but seems to have saved hers.

You can understand tearing up over those heavy thoughts.

One day last week Sutter spent her break standing out back of the bakery looking down at the brook. Her long white hair hung in a signature pony tail out the back end of a baseball cap. The water is laced with tubing meant to siphon off the diesel fuel, motor oil and any acid spilled in the crash. Even there, Sutter says, they were lucky. The acid seems to have mostly stayed inside the bags it was packaged in and stearic acid – made of animal fat and used as an industrial lubricant – is not in the same toxic class as, say, sulphuric or hydrochloric acid.

Sutter says customers have been coming in and asking about the accident, telling her they saw the tail end of the event or that for some reason that morning they were running late and didn’t get there early as they usually do

You should think about moving the building, they tell her.

You need bigger blocks they tell her – echoing the famous line from the movie Jaws when the shark fighting sheriff first sees the Great White they are after and mutters: “We need a bigger boat.”

But in truth, you only have so much control over fate.The runaway ramp installed in 2001 after an asphalt truck overturned onto the intersection of the highway and Cold Spring was supposed to prevent catastrophe. Those 7,000-pound cement blocks the Sutters installed after numerous cars going too fast skidded into their lot and one small truck rammed into the woods didn’t even slow the tractor-trailer.

If Sutter is a little jumpy, if emotion overcomes her still is waves, you can understand why.

The end of Route 2 in Williamstown and the tracks of a truck on a deadly last run